Race has played a gigantic role in Texas history. In my essay I will convey multiple examples on how race shaped the history of the great state of Texas. I chose this theme because to me this was the best way to relate to the assignment and present the information. I believe race is one of the most important components to understand Texas history. The race is a categorization of people based on shared physical and social traits into discrete groups within a particular culture. Initially, the phrase was meant to refer to users of a shared language; later, it has been used to relate to national loyalties. For over 14,000 years ago, different races began to arrive in what is now known as the Americas. Over centuries, a varied group of American Indians established empires on the continent of Texas, establishing sophisticated cities and creating complicated trading networks and complex social structures (Smith, 2009). However, Europeans changed this when they first landed on what was to become the Texas Gulf Coast throughout the 16th Century; such long-standing Native American cultures were upended. Several prominent American Indian tribes were displaced and destroyed. In contrast, many more were destroyed due to the loss of control over resources, such as food and land, by the United States government.

Early races in Texas

The notion of race in indigenous Texas may be traced back to the earliest forms of civilization. The Karankawas were among the very first Native Americans in Texas to come into contact with Europeans. In 1528, the remnants of a Spanish catastrophe included explorer Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, who washed up on the shore and lived among the indigenous people for six years (La Vere, 2004). Greater than three hundred years later, by 1685, the Karankawas invaded and destroyed the little French town of Fort St. However, over many decades after European colonization, more racial segregation occurred. Europeans captured and enslaved an increasing number of Red Indians, with many slaves arriving from Africa. The continual influx of new tribes impacted the survival of the first races in the state of Texas.

Upon the arrival of European settlers, the residents of Central Texas did not belong to the indigenous inhabitants of Texas. The Tonkawa and Caddo were among the two most significant indigenous races in Central Texas (La Vere, 2004). When Europeans invaded the region, the Caddo territory reached only much further west as the escarpment, while the Tonkawa range covered the Edwards Plateau region. The Caddo people had huge communities, farming, and well-developed urban culture. At the same time, The Tonkawa belonged to a semi-nomadic community of buffalo hunters who practiced minor cultivation and settled in sparsely populated areas. The latter hunted mammoths on Buttermilk Creek but had probably come a few hundred to thousands of years before European settlers.

The Atakapa, Mariame, Karankawa, and Akokisa were a few American Indian races who lived along the Texas Gulf Coast. They lived near the beach during half of the year and moved up to 30 to 45 miles inland the rest of the year, although they were also semi-nomadic. Hunting, fishing, and foraging for tubers and other fruits and vegetables allowed them to adapt effectively to living on the ocean's edge. It wasn't long before they came up with inventive solutions to common problems, such as smearing their bodies in alligator and shark grease to ward off mosquitoes.

Finally, most western and eastern states have indigenous populations and traditions, both contemporary and traditional. These peoples and distinct cultures are prominent and apparent in the public domain. There are only three small reservations left in Texas. The Alabama-Coushatta in East Texas and the Kickapoo, mostly on the Rio Grande – were established for migrants Native Americans. This means the survivors of tribes who were compelled into Texas from original homes and lands in the eastern parts of the United States. Although they were originally from now New Mexico, many of the Tigua Indians who live on Texas' third reservation, which is in the El Paso region, were, in fact, immigrants from that state, people who fled their homelands during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

The beginning of the 19th century would be the beginning to a long period of violence and war in Texas that would almost lead to the removal of Hispanic presence. In 1800 Napoleon Bonaparte, French military leader, forced Spain to give up power of Louisiana as a part of his grand scheme to have his own French empire in North America. When his plan succeeded, he sold the territory back to the United States in 1803. This sale of land was called the famous Louisiana Purchase. A lot of conflict would begin to occur after the Louisiana purchase such as the Mexican War of Independence. There were many deadly battles throughout the war but the bloodiest battle to ever occur on Texas soil happened in 1813 and led to the deaths of thousands of Tejanos. This bloody battle left Nacogdoches completely abandoned and left San Antonio in ruins.

Mexico was able to gain independence after winning the war against Spain.

This period after Mexico gained independence is most known as Mexican Texas. Mexico had been struggling for independence for about a decade and this long fight had left the nation in a dire situation. Throughout the war hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost and injured leaving most of the country in grief of their loved ones. With so many lives being lost the country was uneasy. Apart from that, agriculture was completely ruined, and this was a huge problem for the entire country as this is something that everyone relies on. Mexico was trying to build their empire back up and one of the things they needed to do was form a solid national government. In 1823 the country decided to move from a centralized monarchy to a federal republic.

In 1822, Father Refugio de la Garza (San Antonio’s parish priest) arrived in Mexico City as Texas’s delegate to the Imperial congress, and he came with a list of things that Texas needed to improve. One of the things that he had on his list was that Texas needed a military campaign to stand against the Indians. He also stated that they would need to build a barrier to protect them from both Indian and foreign intruders. Father Refugio de la Garza had a small amount of success as some of the colonization and secularization laws that he supported was passed but most were not. He was unable to get the government to take him serious enough to address the troops that were already situated in Texas let alone expand their military power and get more troops.

When Stephen F Austin left for Mexico City in 1833, there was an influx of people from the United States illegally crossing the Sabine and not acknowledging the Law of April 6. These people were influenced by a book on Texas by Mary Austin Holley who is Austin Connecticut’s cousin. In this book she depicted what it was like to live in Texas in the Anglo colonies at that time. She used convincing language throughout her book like “even privations become pleasures” and “people become ingenious in overcoming difficulties.” People now looked at Texas as a land of wealth.

The Spanish and Mexican officials saw the Anglo-American colonization as a great opportunity to improve Mexico after its devastation after the war. They also saw it as an opportunity to diminish the threat of US expanding. Although everything looked like it was going to go plan by 1830 the immigration from the United States was way out of Mexico’s control and with Mexico losing control that gave America room to move in.

Race played an enormous part in America's expansion into Texas. Just think about this you were a certain skin color you were taken out of your home and everything in your world that you worked for has crumbled just because of the color of your skin. Your way of life was altered without their consent just because someone wanted to better their family, they tear down another.

After the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty defined the U.S.-Mexico boundary, Spain began actively encouraging Americans to settle their northern province. Texas was sparsely settled, and the few Mexican farmers and ranchers who lived there were under constant threat of attack by hostile Indian tribes, especially the Comanche. This shows that two races were already there that they came and uprooted them and their loved ones.

Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845 and became the 28th state. Until 1836, Texas had been part of Mexico, but in that year a group of settlers from the United States who lived in Mexican Texas declared independence. The annexation of Texas contributed to the coming of the Mexican American War. Essentially that’s what the war was, the name of it is the evidence.” Mexican American” sounds like a race war to me. U.S. President James K. Polk, who believed the United States had a “manifest destiny” to spread across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. A border battle along the Rio Grande started the fighting and was followed by a series of U.S. victories. When everything was said and done, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory. Now that is a clear example of one side conquering another side, I.E. Mexican American. “The Mexican government seemed equally determined to avoid losing any part of her national domain” Western Historical Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 2 (Apr. 1970), pp. 161-174 (page 1).

This shows you that they were ready to do whatever it took to succeed. This race war was over territory that ended up being settled by government officials after the American warpath.

In April 1836 gained Texas its independence. Texas requested immediate admission into the United States, but opposition from the North to the addition of another slave state to the Union. The last time I checked slavery was the ownership of a human being used for work without pay. So, Americans owed people of color to expand the United States all because one race felt more superior than another to take them and use them anyway, they saw fit. What do you mean by expanding? you may ask, let me elaborate. African Americans did all the dirty work so America could be where it is today.

Race has been a huge influence on the expansion of America. Since the start, it was us verse them. When I say that expression, I mean the Americans versus whoever they wanted to trounce. Race is embedded into the United States, the examples that I’ve given in this text are proof that race played a gigantic part in expanding America into Texas. With that expansion came with the oppressing of a certain demographic of people that where enslaved because of it.

Texas is one of the states that reveals a great history of slavery in the United States. Throughout the entire state, Texas acts as a condensed version of the slavery practice as an entity. Texas had urban and rural environments where slavery was treated differently based on the circumstances and rulers' altitude towards the African Americans. Even if slavery had begun to fall apart in various parts of the Southern United States, Texas had rigidly embedded slavery in its fabric. The African Americans had been inextricably tied to the history of Texas since its past colonization days. Despite the African, American Texans being a subject of racism and oppression, violence, slavery, and discrimination created their culture and community. Through their valuable cultural and historical contributions, they developed the Texas state.

Texas was a unique state as it had both mixed rural plantations and urban environments where slavery was first practiced and was made a vital activity of the state’s economy. According to Calvert et al. (2020), 30% of the Texas population were slaves in these rural plantations in 1860. Slavery was treated as an economic institution because it was profitable to most Texas landowners who acquired slaves. Slavery for Africa Americans was not practiced in the Northern part of America despite being the most industrialized part of America. The Northern natural environment was efficient because the landowners harvested large amounts of cotton (Calvert et al., 2020). The cotton plantation was the primary source of passive income throughout the Texas state because goods were produced and manufactured from the plant. Due to these production and manufacturing mechanisms in the cotton industry, African American slavery continued to become a vital cog.

As per Beamish (2017), slavery began to end in some parts of the urbanized South before the civil war was raised. However, this is not the case in Texas; there was rampant militancy of the slave owners, especially in the urban areas. Unlike other slaves in the U.S who had given up on being treated violently by the whites, the Texan Black slaves did not resolve social control across the state as they had the willingness to endure and persist torture in the plantations. In the white patriarchal culture, it was embedded that the Mexicans were taken out of Austin upon being charged with interrupting the city slaves (Buenger, 2016).

Mexico had outlawed the practice of slavery earlier ago thus, and Texas acquired its unique virtue of identity that separated the Hispanic population from the whites and practiced subsequent assimilation in the U.S (Beamish, 2017). Slavery was part of the Texas lifestyle for the Hispanic population. On Juneteenth, Arnette Gordon Reed tells personal tales about Texas and American racism by taking us through the unrelenting racism hidden in Texas history. Gordon-Reed combines the history of America, family chronicle dramas, and searing memoir episodes to give a historian view of Texas's long journey to Juneteenth. Gordon-Reed further recounts the origin of slavery in Texas and illustrates the vast challenges that African Americans went through during the 19th century (Gross, 2021). Gordon-Reed is aware of the cowboys, ranchers, oilmen narratives that dominated the Lone Star State lore; thus, she forges her home state narrative with the implications of all the enslaved people driven to Texas.